Chuck Palahniuk
You humiliate a rich person and they're still rich. You humiliate a brilliant person and they're still smart. A person who is well connected is still the king of England. But if you humiliate a young person, you take away the only form of power they have.Collection: Kings
I don't remember the hotel rooms or the airports but I always remember the events.Collection: Airports
The weather today is an increasing trend towards denial.Collection: Weather
"Getting fired," Tyler says, "is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we’d quit treading water and do something with our lives."Collection: Water
More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can't stop.Collection: Cry
Nothing happened, and nothing kept happening.Collection: Happened
I have a secret goal with my editor - he has asthma and uses his inhaler, and after I send him a new manuscript, I'll have his assistant phone me and tell me how many times he had to get his inhaler out while reading a draft. It's my secret laugh meter.Collection: Reading
My stories tend to bring people from isolation into community - with at least one other person, usually with a whole community of people - so that they find themselves accepted back by a world that they kind of fled from.Collection: People
The last story you should write is the most important story. You should start with a story that is just an amusing, entertaining, fun story to write and learn your writing chops with the least important things before you start applying them to the most important things.Collection: Fun
What we think of as Halloween is really the product of media barons, city mayors, and candy-makers. You know, before the 1920s, Halloween was really a terrible, terrible night.Collection: Halloween
That guy behind me on the airplane? He's been kicking my seat because he hates me. He's kicking my seat because he hates me and I'm gonna kill him. When we get off this plane, I'm gonna make eye contact. I'm gonna kill that guy. And all of that is just stuff in my head, but it's good to get rid of that stuff.Collection: Hate
We're so structured and micromanaged, this isn't a world anymore, it's a damn cruise ship.Collection: World
On game shows, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer and dryer pair.Collection: Games
the world is the cradle and your trap.Collection: World
Oh love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I'll be anybody you want me to be.Collection: Want
We all have this moment, when your folks first see you as someone not growing up to be them.Collection: Growing Up
Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.Collection: Children
No, it's not fair, but what makes Earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You'll find out for yourself soon enough. It won't help the situation for you to get all upset.Collection: Soon Enough
The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.' Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.Collection: Happiness
Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE.Collection: Writing
Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency.Collection: Children
I am Joe's Enraged, Inflamed, sense of rejection.Collection: Rejection
You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.Collection: Beautiful
It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.Collection: Pain
Life is short, death is forever.Collection: Life Is Short
Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.Collection: Effort
The first rule of fight club is, you don’t talk about fight club.Collection: Fighting
The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly.Collection: Reality
We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.Collection: Stars
How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?Collection: Fighting
Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly – all these make for great stories.Collection: Adventure
If you love something set it free, but don’t be surprised if it comes back with herpes.Collection: Broken Heart
Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It’s because they know what it’s like to be treated like an animal.Collection: Vegan
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.Collection: Real
You’ll need to suffer to make any real art.Collection: Real
No, none of us seem so very real. We’re only supporting characters in the lives of each other. Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe.Collection: Real
Real writers write because they love to write. They don’t write for public acclaim.Collection: Real
At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you’ll have left.Collection: Stories
The first step to eternal life, is you have to die.Collection: Firsts
I really believe it’s the moments we can’t talk about that become the rest of our lives. It’s the moments we can’t process by telling a story that destroy us in the end.Collection: Stories
For six months I couldn’t sleep. With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.Collection: Real
We’ve been speaking English as a second language so long that we’ve forgotten it as our first.Collection: Firsts
There’s always the chance you could die right in the middle of your life story.Collection: Stories
I want to find something else, unknowable, some place that’s not on the map. A real adventure.Collection: Real
You realize that people take drugs because it’s the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.Collection: Real
My stories tend to bring people from isolation into community – with at least one other person, usually with a whole community of people – so that they find themselves accepted back by a world that they kind of fled from.Collection: Stories
I hate how I don’t feel real enough unless people are watching.Collection: Real
The money is in television. Books are not the dominant medium of our time, so fewer people will create them. In a sad way, books have become a form of “comfort food” we expect to lull us to sleep.Collection: Book
The bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I’ll have to break out and live a real life. Our real discoveries come from chaos. – Brandy Alexander.Collection: Real